Just a place to share some thoughts

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Getting Organized

OK, confession time here.

When it comes to digital organization, I am probably one of the worst ever. I create files and documents and drop them into a folder/directory called “Doug’s Documents”. Periodically, I’ll feel guilty knowing that stuff is just sitting there completely unorganized and I’ll take the time to put them where they need to go for later retrieval. It’s a technique that’s been the bane of my digital existence since I saved my first file on some random floppy disk and had to find it later.

I have the greatest admiration for people with the discipline to “Save As” instead of “Save” and put the file where it needs to go right from the get go. I have a friend who has a different technique. She saves everything to her desktop and when she quits her application, files the documents where they need to go. Again, I have admiration for that. I wish I could do that. I know that there’s no excuse. It’s a personal flaw.

To make things worse, I have taken my lack of organization to the cloud. I’m a big Dropbox user and to quote my Grade 8 teacher, at times, it looks like “a dog’s breakfast“. I’ve never actually understood that since my dog’s breakfast look like his dinner, but I digress. Periodically, I’ll go on a cleaning binge and organize things manually, way after the fact.

Fortunately, I have taken the time to learn how to write mail rules and can manage my email inbox better than that.

I’m a digital whatever in search of a solution. I may have found it in SortMyBox. It brings the concept of rules to Dropbox.

The promise is to create filing rules depending upon the file attributes. So, if the file that you upload has a particular extension, i.e. .jpg, .png, .gif, … it will tuck it away in a folder within your Dropbox that you define. Now, I can just imagine a folder full of images but at least they wouldn’t be sitting at the root folder mixed in with documents, presentations, movies, etc.

It sounds like an interesting concept. I’m already wondering about using it in conjunction with Dropittome. If students were required to add a prefix like a course code or period so that hand-ins are filed into the appropriate class folder, that would be very helpful.

In the meantime, perhaps it’s the solution to my organization problem.